I just listened to it again…it’s actually the keyboardist and she says, “Babe, it’s a love song…pull back. Pulsate…”
Todd Rundgren, “Hello It’s Me”. The version I have starts with Mr. Rundgren saying, “wait a minute, just gimme, gimme … gimme a break a second.” He counts off and starts the song twice, and then the third time is the “real” take.
I wouldn’t know why they left it in, though … they didn’t need to, and it’s sort of annoying.
I think Green Day did it in a recording of “Good Riddance.”
Also, Eminem in “Cleaning Out My Closet” spoke at the beginning about not having snare in his headphones. I don’t know if that counts though.
Michael Stipe laughs at the end of the line “or a reading of Dr. Seuss” during The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite (Automatic for the People). It’s my favorite thing about the track.
I didn’t remember this, but that’s Dog Bite, from the In God We Trust, Inc. EP. I’ve been meaning to dig that out for the last few days.
I was going to mention this one, but I didn’t because on second thought, I decided it wasn’t actually a bad take. There just happens to be a little chatter before the song begins. Rundgren is counting off the song by playing that chord on the organ twice before the final “one, two, three” to get the song moving rhythmically before the start. At least this is how I see it.
I always loved this. I’m glad they left it in because I like to hear musicians in the studio. It breaks the fourth wall a little.
Yeah “Good Riddance” false starts at the beginning, Armstrong drops what sounds like the f-bomb, and they start again. Gotta be deliberate.
Another one is Blood, Sweat and Tears “Spinning Wheel”. At the very end, after the carnival music breaks down, you can hear them laughing as the lead singer says “That wasn’t too good…”
Dog Bite:
That’s the first thing I thought of when I saw this thread. In a similar vein, the recording of “Suze” on the Bootleg Series Volume 1 has 1:33 of an instrumental guitar/harmonica track, and then an audible cough… Dylan stops playing and says, “that was the end. Back just before I coughed. It fades out.” He starts playing again for a few seconds, then stops and laughs. The sound engineer replies, “I’ll note here, ‘fade at cough.’”
On the album, it’s subtitled, “The Cough Song.”
The Beach Boys are the absolute kings of the extraneous studio chatter left on
records - the most obvious and notorious example is the loud cough in the middle of “Wendy” - but taking the OP to it’s most literal point, then champ has to be Brian Wilson’s sabotaging of “Help Me Rhonda” on “The Beach Boys Today” - when the record company pressured Wilson to deliver the track before he deemed it ready, he gave it some horrible varipseeding in the fade out, which went on forever. Then, to teach the company a lesson, he remade the song on their next album and had a #1 hit with it!
In the song “You’re Only Human (Second Wind)” by Billy Joel, Billy stumbles over one of the lines and can be heard laughing it off. He left it in the take as the song was about teenage suicide prevention and he felt it illustrated the song’s point of personal forgiveness of one’s mistakes.
Not a flubbed line, but I recall very clearly hearing the drummer drop the beat in 10,000 Maniacs’ Scorpio Rising.
Only on the SDMB would someone post this before me. Even without the flub left in it’s still one of the worst songs ever recorded - intentionally so (“please hold onto the steel rail” :))
That reminds me of the many times when the producers suddenly shift from one take to another in a song and you can hear a sort of “tape scratch” when it happens - the most egregious example being in Pink Floyd’s “Matilda Mother”, and I include it in this thread because it’s so obvious they had to have known, but Syd probably didn’t want to record the song a second time 
Another example happens in the CD I happen to be listening to now: in the beginning of the second verse to Beck’s Loser he almost says “…orces of evil in a Bozo nightmare” and I think they either did that on purpose or thought it would make it sound rawer.
On David Bowie’s Space Oddity there’s a song, Dont Sit Down, that disintergrates into laughter and noodling after about 40 seconds.
The iMadcap Laughs was my first thought as well
Another one from the Beatles.
Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da
The line was to remain: “Molly stays at home and does her pretty face / and in the evening she’s a singer in the band” in both places.
In the studio, after another countless take, with John and George now thoroughly sick of the tune, Paul had finished off the vocals with what all had hoped would be the one used on the final track.
Afterward Paul noted that he thought he had sung the lyric as “Desmond stays at home and does his pretty face…” John and George didn’t give a rip but they played the song back and sure enough, Paul had goofed up the names.
In the end, they kept it as is with Paul saying something along the lines that people can think Desmond was some closet transvestite or something.
The song works better this way.
Todd Rundgren’s “Hello It’s Me” contains a flubbed line in addition to the false start- near the end he mumbles the beginning of the line “I’ll come around to see you once in a while” before catching himself.
Natalie Imbruglia’s “Torn” has her almost say the wrong word but catches herself in time, can’t recall exactly where, it is very subtle.
There are a few instances of this on the “Something/Anything” album. On the song “Couldn’t I Just Tell You”, there is a false start and then you can hear Todd say “Mother of God!” before counting off for take two. Also, in the middle of “You Left Me Sore”, his voice cracks while trying to hold a note and you can hear the other people in the studio laughing in the background. And other songs just have little bits of studio chatter in-between.
At the end of the Smiths song I Started Something I Couldn’t Finish, you can hear Morrissey saying to Stephen Street (producer): “Okay Stephen, let’s do that again.”
There’s also some noises going on at the end of *Pashernate Love * that must have been intentional… not sure how to describe them. Sounds like someone dropping their equipment and running out the door?
At the beginning of the Sloan song* Loosens*, you can hear them getting ready, someone counting, then the song begins.
I don’t know if Damon of Blur intentionally laughed in the middle of Uncle Love, but he does and I like it.
Is that the song that begins “I was sailing* on the Mayflower and I thought I saw some land…” Because that’s the first thing that popped into my head.
*sailing? riding? I forget.
My gut feeling is that was intentional, because M&P vocals were so layered that even if they made a false start on the first take, they wouldn’t repeat it accidentally on the “thickening” subsequent takes with such good timing.
There is a spot at the end of Midnight Voyage where the group has a false start, the control room appears to break in to tell them to do it again, they have another false start, some inane banter, then a spectacular blast of a single vocal line, followed by “You like that, Lou [Adler]?” and the songs finishes. My WAG is it was at least partly staged as a gag.
But while we’re on Mamas & Papas, when I first got a CD compilation of theirs and played Creeque Alley, I heard some faint flute “noodling” on just one channel inbetween the familiar solos. I was so familiar with the original recording that this popped out, and I went to my original LP and played the same song. Sure enough, if you listened very carefully, the same flute was on the same channel, but much more buried. My theory is that since the channel separation on an LP is a lot less than a CD, that it passed notice all those years. It sounds like the flute is just warming up as it is not playing anything that appears connected to the melody, and my WAG is the mixing engineer just didn’t cut the track’s level at that spot the way he should have.
On the same song is a tiny spot where the echo of the last syllable of “reality” comes thru a few bars after the main vocal BG. Just the echo, not the “-ty”, and it’s very faint, but I can’t imagine it was left in intentionally.
There’s also a spot on another M&P song – I can’t remember which one – where the echo for the vocal BG is chopped off at the end of a phrase just where the next one begins. This could have been caused by a physical tape splice, not uncommon in those days, although it seems odd that the echo was imbedded in the source track; usually all echo is added during the mixdown from multi-track to stereo final mix. This abrupt echo-end is used for effect nowdays, but in the 60’s it was considered a recording blunder.
“I was riding on the Mayflower when I thought I spotted some land… hoo hoo hoo hoo… start again! Haa haa haa haa… wait a minute, now … ha ha ha… .okay, take two.”
This was the first one I thought of… and I suspect that, even if Dylan wasn’t the first, the practice would never have caught on if he hadn’t done it first.